Animation 38
Once Upon a Time… Life
By Raz Greenberg. Based on Akane Shimizu’s original manga, David Production’s Cells at Work! quickly became one of the highlights of the current anime season, especially due to its innovative concept: portraying the cells within the human body as anthropomorphised characters, with a particular emphasis given to the daring deliveries of oxygen by the red […]
Disenchantment
By Andrew Osmond. The first thing to stress is that Disenchantment, now streaming on Netflix, gets better. This is a terrible advert for a TV series, of course, though anime fans may be readier than most viewers to give animated shows time to improve. After a first part that feels naff and derivative – and […]
Flavors of Youth
By Andrew Osmond. In 2016, Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name became the highest-grossing Japanese film ever released in China. That may explain the existence of the Japan-animated, Chinese-set Flavors of Youth (as the film is called on pretty much every Anglophone source online, so Brit readers will just have to put up with the American spelling). […]
Books: Max Fleischer
By Raz Greenberg. 76 years after they were forced out of their own studio, a move that marked the end of their prominent role in the development of American animation, the legacy of animation pioneers brothers Max (1883-1972) and David (1894-1979) Fleischer is still alive and kicking, and nowhere is this legacy more evident than […]
Yellow Submarine
by Jeremy Clarke. Back on the big screen in a welcome one-day outing fifty years after its original 1968 release, The Beatles: Yellow Submarine remains one of the most remarkable animated feature films ever made. It turned the medium on its head in the English-speaking world, eschewing Disney’s dominant visual style and children’s audience for […]